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Three Poems

There is a world in which the old tumult breathes its conclusions. Inside, we are purple notes and wings of doves, visibility nothing can equal, which holds us, hesitating, as if movement might break the tender chord we strike as antidote to time. Unmask me, double me, make me a tangent in your circle of radiant breath—here with you, where the said is an offering. We are reworked, the moment a measuring device and a grace note, sorrow’s window closed to the view.

Knowing

“A secret dream of emulating the cartographer or the diamond cutter animates the historical enterprise.”—Paul Ricoeur

You’re here on a couch, pillows fluffed, dreaming in Latin. You’re in a tablet carved on a mountain and given to men whose ears filled with ontology. You’re near a stream whose source is the next cogency for a traveler stunned as Hölderlin trying to remember his name. You’re in the dream in which his hands are yours and conclusions marked by sighs and breathing. You are nowhere, a signal or code meant to sweep you under a wave or a cloud or a whispered veil of induction. The French Revolution began without you and ended the same. You are not needed in this chapter in which the king’s clothes are described as raiment or ermine cloak. If you are required by time and its minions, you will receive notice, as spiders when the dew shakes a web and the world blinks to attention.

Subplot

Lost on a night when referencesuffices for human events, the slow distance between bodiesreaches for narratives of innocenceor crushes as fallen feathers. On a plank of sleep he sees the emptytree, flown birds’ narrow hotelof blue and leaf and fragrant wood, light, an envelope in her marble hand. If reaching means proximity, life thinksotherwise, leaves books open to weather, pummels history with slow report. Explanations slip as diamonds in a mossy sea, or time, a science of feeling. Eclipse imminent, papered walls suffer with impunitythe loss of probable light. We are not alone with our discipline, the smooth stones we carvefrom childhood to convergence to dawn.

Maxine Chernoff is a professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and a 2013 NEA Fellow in poetry. She is the author of six books of fiction and sixteen books of poetry, including Camera (Subito). In fall of 2016 she was a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome.